POLITICS. POP CULTURE. BEAUTY

2016 in review!

Things are moving way too fast. Too fast to allow your brain and especially your heart to fathom them. To internalize them as you usually do.

Relationships fade and sprout in oblivion. Some presumed eternally-kept bonds slowly disappeared before your mental sight, but you feel like just with any law of nature, they just do with time. There’s nothing that you can do to salvage them. You have no time to neither reflect nor pause for sigh.

Crisis are piled up and lumped together with no sense of order in an internal invisible bubble that is carefully stored deep deep inside your heart so that you may find some “convenient” time to sort them out. But you know deep down that there is no greater fallacy than this. You underestimate the nature of bubbles. Bubbles pop when they become too big. Perhaps, the piling has to be done in small little bubbles. Hmm.

Everyday, just as you put on a physical mask with layers of primer, foundation and powder, you also put on an internal mask; a mask of confidence, elegance and firmness. You’re supposed to walk, look, sit a certain way. A showcase of emotional bulletproofness is necessary for you to be taken seriously. Your emotion is your weakness and weaknesses should never be on display. Thus, in tense times, you find yourself tucked behind closed doors, sobbing silently, wailing with a muffled voice so as not to be heard and quickly touch up your tears-soaked face with tissues once you tell yourself that you’re done being weak.

Distractions. Those are the tools that you have improvised so systematically in your system once things do not go according to your plan or people are not living up to your expectations. You do away with distracting yourself. You put on your running shoes, plug in your headphones and off you go running. Running away from your problems and other complications in life. You grab a car key and turn on the music and drive yourself away from people that break your heart. You get on an LRT and watch the sceneries outside the window or observe diverse commuters’ characters on board. You watch life unfolding to distract from sorting out your own messy troubled life.

Things are much better done alone you thought. You’ve grown weary of waiting for people to either share the same passion as you do or even find time to answer your messages. Hence, you’d rather tread those paths alone nursing your heart along the way.

Things are running fast. They’re practically sprinting. Work, relationships, friendships are bundled together. You’re living a modern 21st century life you thought. But just with any bundling of things, a bundled life is guaranteed to be a messy life.

What do you actually seek in life?

You wanted to rise. To rise from the ashes of your more-bitter than sweet past. You wanted to break free from the fortress of rigidity that you have meticulously built to suit your past circumstances. You are working yourself to frequent gastric attacks and sleepless nights to extract all the juice of potentials that bubbled and fermented in yourself. You wanted to convince yourself that YES you can do it all!

But, perhaps it’s all an illusion. What you’re going after, what you put on display. They’re all simply tainted in layers and layers of subtle hypocrisy. Hypocrisies that shove themselves on your mental and moral consciousness, every time you look at yourself in the mirror, but those that you choose to ignore and walk away from out of the need to sprint fast to achieve your goals, however ambiguous they’re becoming every day.

Can we possibly change without entirely losing our sense of ourselves in the past?

The world has a convenient way of telling us that you’re supposed to act and be in a certain way once you’re moving up and down life’s numerous and complicated phases. But, in truth, the perceived weaknesses are weaknesses ONLY in their eyes. Your natural tenderness, sense of compassion and an abundant love for others should never be compromised. Because losing those means that you’re losing a real sense of being a human. In the world of rigidity where are you are treated like a productive subject (read: a machine) to satisfy the economy’s needs for efficiency and productivity, it’s rare to find people that would be bold enough to wear their hearts on their sleeves. To love others unconditionally. To cross the sea of fires for others. To serve others and not your own whims and desires. Embrace your inner loving self and sure, do put on a mask but be sure that you’re comfortable when you have to take it off too!

2016, you have been one colorful, wonderful, flavorful, emotional-filled year!

May 2017 be a year that allows all of us to grow into more tolerant, loving, dynamic human beings and servants of the Most-High. May we never lose track of why we are here and where we are going. May we fill it with an abundance of good deeds for whatever life that we have left on this earth. May it be a year that is filled with constant prosperity not just in the form of materials but most importantly happiness and inner serenity.